<p>Haha – I’m also living proof that vocal talents needn’t spring equally from both sides of the family. That said, though, were most of you aware at an early age that there was something special about your kids’ voices? I know D would routinely be recruited to selective local choirs when people heard her singing in public restrooms. :)</p>
<p>I’m also really interested to hear what specific aspects of a voice can be significantly altered with training, and how much.</p>
<p>@soozievt – Like yours, our D has often been called in for roles by people she’s worked with previously (in fact it happened again over Christmas Break), so I can imagine how important that professional network can become.</p>
<p>I also know of some recent grads who were not well cast in college BFA programs, yet went on to become some of the biggest success stories of their class. From this I gather that failing to connect with TPTB in college is not the kiss of professional death, or even the key determining factor in whether you’ll be transformed, fine-tuned or hardly changed by their program.</p>
<p>In my case with my MT daughter, the answer is yes, we knew at an early age that she was a very good singer and performer (though didn’t know right away how she’d fare on a more national scale). She started being in musicals at age 4 1/2. She used to have a very big voice (she even wrote in one of her college essays about her loud voice!). She would belt out a tune. My father used to call her Ethel Merman when she was very young and my parents would ask her to perform for their friends when she visited. She performed locally and people would take notice. Her passion for MT started very young. She kept getting cast in everything she tried for. Then, at age 9, she went away to a theater camp with kids from all around the country and was cast well and we were amazed by the talent there and then to see our child be quite competitive there, it gave us more of an idea of her talent than simply locally. She never took voice lessons until age 12, but by then, we knew she was talented in this area, and did well in some auditions in NYC that she attended on a few occasions. We live in a rural area as a point of reference. That said, while my D improved her skill set over the years of her youth, she surely took it way further in her BFA program, just to bring it back to the original topic of this thread.</p>
<p>I have a different experience from you guys as far as singing and early talent. The first time I ever really noticed any of my children could sing was when my older son had his bar mitzvah His tone was lovely. My ex mother in law is a voice teacher, though, and I’ve had the fortune to be around singers, so I didn’t really think much of it. I sort of had a passive attitude for better or worse–theatre just wasn’t on the horizon and I thought of singing as a nice, fun skill, nothing more. Then my son was cast as the lead in his middle school play–until then no one in our family had any interest at all in theatre or performing. As that son got older, he became more interested in acting and singing, but with guys it’s different. You really have to wait for the voice to mature. My younger son did have a lovely soprano and by then we were immersed enough in theatre - each child influencing the next! - but what was noticeable about his voice was that he sang on pitch. This was inborn, not trained. He actually had the sort of voice that is considered good for shows–it wasn’t ‘girly’ or belting style, and he did get cast pretty frequently in professional shows when they needed boys. By that time, my older four were all singing, both in their excellent choir (which I’ve written about elsewhere) as well as in theatre. They got classical training as opposed to belting. For my kids, except for my older daughter who isn’t an actor, the singing has been secondary to the acting; a tool they can use to convey character. </p>
<p>My ex mother in law always said that anyone can learn to sing with the right training, or almost anyone. But it’s obvious it comes much easier to some than others. I can’t sing but I can hear, so it’s painful for me to listen to myself! I often feel like the dad in the Von Trapp family… </p>
<p>ANyway, my kids’ stories are not one of early or precocious singing, but of gradual self discovery.</p>
<p>As one who has always admitted to having zero perspective about my own kids, I’m more interested in this question of Vocal Nature versus Nature in relation to other kids I’ve watched going through BFA programs over the years, as well as famous singers who I’ve been able to see perform as youngsters.</p>
<p>It seems from those observations that truly remarkable voices are to some extent born versus made, and I’m still not sure how radically voices can be changed over 4 years of college training.</p>
<p>Does anyone have YouTube exambles of someone pre- and post-BFA that illustrate a high level of vocal growth over those 4 years?</p>
<p>Don’t you think the level of training it takes pre-college to get into top programs these days is a big factor here? Most kids don’t just do a few high school shows and wander into a big name college program to get training. They’re already pretty much there.</p>
<p>I wish more of these schools were looking for raw talent to develop, and some may be, but the college audition prep industry is so huge now and starts earlier and earlier. I mean, how much change is even possible?</p>
<p>I think that my daughter, as a “late bloomer”, will probably continue to experience change in her voice over the next four or five years. She might be one of those whom you see a difference pre- and post-college simply because of that.
Rather than being one of those small girls with a big voice, she is a small girl with a sweet voice – she sings mostly mix voice, very forward and bright, very contemporary sounding.
So hopefully college will help her voice to continue to develop as she continues to mature, as well as giving her the opportunity to be seen as more than a child – which is something she is really looking forward to.</p>
<p>I think my D’s voice was truly developed a lot in her BFA program. I’ll admit that she was already a good singer before she started college. In her case, she was still 16 years old when she entered the BFA program. She had had five years of voice lessons prior to college, but had been singing and in musical theater her whole life. </p>
<p>Her forte has always been the belt voice and she was a very good belter prior to college. However, her legit soprano was not yet developed. She was working on it prior to college auditions, though not that confident in singing in higher ranges. In fact, a couple of BFA schools felt that they did not hear enough of her legit voice in the audition. Two schools vocalized her at the audition (one of these admitted her and the other put her on the priority wait list). The school that rejected her told her afterward that they had not heard enough of her legit voice. She just didn’t sing anything too high at auditions, due to lack of confidence in that range. </p>
<p>Fast forward to freshman year of college. The first year of her BFA program, they focused solely on the legit voice. My D recorded her song (The Lusty Month of May from Camelot) during the freshmen “evaluations” performance for faculty and sent it to me. I could not believe that was her voice. She was singing like a soprano and had never been able to do that before. Just one year and had already made a huge difference. While my D would never be cast in a soprano role, her voice is way more developed now after four years of college. I think she is singing better than ever and the training made a difference. </p>
<p>That said, she also got a lot of acting training in college and she was lacking in training in that area before college as we did not have acting classes at school or locally. I recall when she got the lead in the mainstage musical at her college in her junior year, she reflected that she was glad that her program did not allow freshmen to be cast in shows as she had now benefitted from the training and would never have felt ready for the role she was going to play before the college training the first 2 1/2 years of her BFA program. </p>
<p>I do think my D is naturally a good singer, but I truly believe the college training has further developed her MT skill set and she is much more skilled now because of it, even if she had natural talent and some training going into it.</p>
<p>By the way, my D has NO videos on YouTube from prior to college. Back then, YouTube wasn’t what it is yet today. However, she now would never allow any videos from before college to be posted as she considers that “before I was trained.”</p>
<p>I will mention that even when someone becomes professional, they often still work on developing their voice further. My D is working professionally now and is almost four years out of college (can’t believe that!). She is on the faculty at Pace’s MT program and one of the things she does there is vocal coaching. Many of her students were speaking highly to her of their voice teacher and so my D has decided to take some lessons with that voice teacher recently.</p>
<p>I suspected my D was heading this direction in 5th grade when she got the big solo in the end of the year show. Then in 6th grade she was the only kid in her grade that got a named role in their musical, and I thought hmmm. Then the lead in 7th grade and that gave me more thought that maybe she’s got some talent. But the thing that really made me think this was where she was headed was when we went to Disney World in 9th grade and she made it to the stage of the American Idol Experience show, and the judges told her she had a music theater voice and could have a future in that. My hopes for her engineering career pretty much died that very day.</p>
<p>My daughter was precocious and very bright as a child so acting was her original strength. She began singing in high school but it wasn’t particularly great. After four years of college, her voice is amazing and expressive.</p>
<p>And as Flossy said raw talent/potential vs already groomed talent for college auditions is the constant question - do colleges want to develop talent or just improve upon that which has already begun? My daughter had a vocal teacher at college who said the reason he was so happy they worked together is because he could hear the potential in her voice, that it was not yet developed nor close to it’s peak. She recorded that and listens whenever she’s feeling discouraged. I always say, “It’s not where you start, it’s where you finish, and I’m gonna finish on top!” (Two For the SeeSaw)</p>
<p>It will be interesting for us to see what direction our D goes. She didn’t start acting or have singing lessons until 3 1/2 years ago. It just sort of happened. She will be a freshman this year. (BFA MT). I wonder now how different it might have been if she had some earlier training. That goes for dancing too. She didn’t have dancing lessons and now she is to busy to take any. Hopefully she will get all of that in college.</p>
<p>I’ve recently been wondering about something that might best fit in this thread. </p>
<p>When I studied engineering, there seemed to be a fairly consistent curriculum across schools, so when a company hired someone with a BSME they knew pretty much what to expect in terms of that person’s college training. As a hiring manager I also became aware that grads of certain schools tended to be stronger in some areas than in others.</p>
<p>Obviously some MT programs have very solid reputations (of course one can argue whether their graduates are strong primarily because they were carefully cherry-picked or because they got exceptional training in college), but I’ve wondered recently if there is any sort of “standard skill set” that every MT student should expect to graduate with.</p>
<p>I realize that there are few objective measures of an MT’s skills – aside from a double pirouette and a triple time step – but are there certain skills that a casting director assumes an MT graduate has? If so, do some programs do a better job of teaching that list of basic skills than others? Do some schools have widely-known (or widely-believed) holes in the skills they teach? Has anyone heard a casting director say “I always love grads from ___ program because I know they have been taught to ______?”</p>
<p>I first noticed my daughter seemed to have vocal talent when she was around 5 years old and walked in on her playing with our Karaoke machine. She was playing around and started singing “Valentine” by Martina McBride and she sounded really mature. Her pitch was perfect and her voice had a really lovely quality. My husband and I just looked at each other and thought where the heck is that coming from? Maybe from Grandma who sang opera as a young woman. From that point on she was always singing and seemed like she would want to pursue becoming a pop princess, but then we took her to see “Wicked” and that was it. She walked out of that theatre and proclaimed at 9 years old that is what she wanted to do forever. For the next 6 moths we listened to her belting out Wizard and I! </p>
<p>So a few months later we saw a poster advertising a production of the “Sound of Music” by a local youth theatre company. The production had just ended, but they were auditioning for the next show and she was cast in the ensemble. Since then she has been in 17 shows. It is truly her passion.</p>
<p>Through her affiliation with the theatre company we found her vocal teacher who has truly unlocked her potential. I sent in a little thing belting out Wizard and I and out emerged this young woman with a beautiful classic soprano voice that none of us even knew was there. I remember getting a call after her first lesson and her teacher saying “Did you know she could sing like this?” And my honest response was no since she had never attempted to sing in a classical way before her training began. And it still amazes me every time I see her onstage, especially her recent performance as Cosette. I just hear that voice and think it must be a genetic gift from her Grandma!</p>
<p>So my hope as that a strong college program will continue to develop and refine her vocal talent, perhaps find that belt voice again, and polish her acting and dancing to make her as competitive as she can be in her chosen profession as daunting as that prospect might be. It’s what she wants with every fiber of her being and she works incredibly hard at it, so as a parent I just feel I need to support and encourage her in every way I can!</p>
<p>@sopranomtmom – I hope that when the time comes she finds just such a program! </p>
<p>I had the disheartening experience last year of seeing a performance by a kid I’ve admired since his first year of high school who had just graduated from a top MT BFA program, who actually seemed to have gotten worse since attending college. He used to feel so honest and sweet, but this performance (in a role I’ve always loved) seemed very broad, fake, “canned” and uninteresting. I was shocked! </p>
<p>I was in the very front row in a very large theatre, so maybe he had been trained to “act” for the back row, but whatever had happened in school seemed like a giant step backwards from where I was sitting. Granted it was only one performance of a single role, but it for the first time introduced the unwelcome thought that training and/or maturation could actually have undesirable consequences in some cases. Perish that thought! </p>
<p>To be fair, though, I sat very near to Mandy Patinkin once, and had similar thoughts about that performance, so maybe it really only proves that I should never sit front and center. :)</p>
<p>“are there certain skills that a casting director assumes an MT graduate has? If so, do some programs do a better job of teaching that list of basic skills than others? Do some schools have widely-known (or widely-believed) holes in the skills they teach? Has anyone heard a casting director say “I always love grads from ___ program because I know they have been taught to ______?””</p>
<p>I think this is a question deserving of its own thread!</p>
<p>I did hear of a casting director once saying, “Yeah, that’s the fat kid school.” Needless to say I will never post which school it was, and I did not agree with their assessment, but I’m sure most casting folks have opinions. But in any case, thank goodness there are a wide variety of schools because it is VERY clear that no single school is cranking out every type of performer needed, even if you narrow the needs to Broadway. And virtually every top performer was rejected from at least one top school so they all clearly can make mistakes if they’re seeking to pick the future prize ponies. :)</p>
<p>And then we have those who didn’t graduate college…Sutton Foster, SJB, Eden Espinosa…all highly successful Broadway performers. Life is what you make it. Grabbing each and every experience that comes one’s way whether it be college courses or not. I think each student will come out of their college experience with some growth as long as they are committed to the endeavor. I think it’s more about the student than it is the program.</p>
<p>Great point. No doubt sometimes it’s a function of the student entering college already having lots of solid training under their belt, for others of taking full advantage of opportunities within the program, sometimes of adding opportunities in the local area outside of college to fill holes, and sometimes dropping out to pursue opportunities that present themselves.</p>
<p>I am not expert on any of this. All I know is my D is almost through her first semester of her MT program, and already she can tell she has a much better voice.</p>
His tone was lovely. My ex mother in law is a voice teacher, though, and I’ve had the fortune to be around singers, so I didn’t really think much of it. I sort of had a passive attitude for better or worse–theatre just wasn’t on the horizon and I thought of singing as a nice, fun skill, nothing more. Then my son was cast as the lead in his middle school play–until then no one in our family had any interest at all in theatre or performing. As that son got older, he became more interested in acting and singing, but with guys it’s different. You really have to wait for the voice to mature. My younger son did have a lovely soprano and by then we were immersed enough in theatre - each child influencing the next! - but what was noticeable about his voice was that he sang on pitch. This was inborn, not trained. He actually had the sort of voice that is considered good for shows–it wasn’t ‘girly’ or belting style, and he did get cast pretty frequently in professional shows when they needed boys. By that time, my older four were all singing, both in their excellent choir (which I’ve written about elsewhere) as well as in theatre. They got classical training as opposed to belting. For my kids, except for my older daughter who isn’t an actor, the singing has been secondary to the acting; a tool they can use to convey character. </p>